Gongol.com Archives: September 2024
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September 2, 2024
Given the history of Labor Day, the holiday engenders no shortage of acknowledgments for organized labor unions, particularly as politicians looking toward November seek to drum up both donations and volunteer support. Companies post messages (sometimes platitudes) thanking their employees, and individuals pen thoughts on the evolving nature of work. ■ But what usually goes missing is a broader discussion of how "labor" isn't always an adversary to "capital" within a market economy. There certainly can be confrontation between the two, and sometimes even hostility. But with union membership down to 10% of the US workforce (half of what that rate was in 1983), seeing things through old prisms may no longer be valid. ■ Labor Day would be a very good day to celebrate co-ops, mutual firms, and credit unions alike, not to mention employee-owned companies like ESOPs and solopreneurs. There are lots of ways in which competitive firms can be started and sustained under a free-market framework, and it's short-sighted to pay attention only to the ones that are publicly traded or have an obvious individual "owner". ■ It's good for an economy to have a mix of firm structures, including those that are owned either by member/customers or by the employees themselves. That kind of diversity helps to bring about innovation in the way products and services are developed, to be sure, but perhaps more importantly, they stimulate new developments in areas like operations and management, not to mention finance and R&D. Company governance is undoubtedly different for, say, a large co-op than for a company with a single controlling shareholder. ■ Like technological tools, company structures are neither inherently good nor bad. They depend upon the contexts in which they are put to work, and the character of the people using them. It doesn't have to stop there, but Labor Day should be a jumping-off point to discuss the many ways in which a bigger vision for how ownership can work may pay dividends more broadly.
September 4, 2024
Don't mine sympathy for clicks
A fair number of news outlets that once were owned mainly by small ownership groups but now belong to sprawling national media "groups" have sought to bump their online traffic figures by posting clickbait in the form of articles drawn from their "sister" stations. These stories are often gut-wrenching stories about calamitous events taking the lives of sympathetic characters like children or fire fighters or police officers -- stories that have always made it hard to look away. ■ And that's the point, of course. Posted along with a snapshot of an attractive adult in their prime or of a cherubic little person, sometimes the social-media editors involved add nothing more than a comment like "Tragic." or "Rest in peace.", with no further context. ■ This is misleading, of course, because a "local" news outlet is intuitively expected to be focused on local events. We humans only have so much attention we can pay to tragedies, and it's inescapable that we take more interest in those that happen close to home (where it is at least somewhat possible that we might know, or be within a few degrees of separation of, the victim) than in those happening far away. ■ There is something especially ghoulish about profiting off stories of distant tragedies in this way -- it's misleading, if not outright deceptive, for those stories to be mined for local attention when they are not actually local. It's a form of mining human sympathy for clicks. ■ It's a particularly despicable practice when the story doesn't actually advance anything new worth knowing. Sometimes there actually are new and real dangers that demand widespread attention. But those instances are few and far between; more often, the clickbait is merely there to report on a freak incident -- one-in-a-million events that, statistically, are unavoidable in a country of 330 million people. ■ The practice should be discouraged, if not widely disclaimed altogether. It's not journalistically novel nor productive, and it probably depletes the reservoirs of attention that people can afford to expend on tragic stories without having to tune out altogether. That can be a real danger when there are very big and very troubling problems that also demand attention, especially because they are matters that human beings can and should try to change. Times are tough for local media, to be sure. But they shouldn't undermine public expectations of context, balance, and local newsworthiness along the way.
September 5, 2024
Speak the tongue, remember the decisions
A project is underway to revive the Dakota language of the Santee Sioux by teaching it to volunteer adult learners. It is a story we hear periodically about someone working earnestly to teach people a rare language before it goes extinct, one that usually begins as a bittersweet tale about someone's labor of love to honor a parent or a grandparent. ■ Languages matter as a vital form of cultural expression. There's no doubt that the survival of a language is vital to preserving cultural history -- not just a code to translate it, but real, live speakers who recognize things like idioms and nuances, and who are able to translate, knowing the difference between poetry and prose. Lots of languages are known only by speakers numbering in the dozens or hundreds, and they are vulnerable to withering away altogether. ■ Some of the information carried in languages is self-rewarding; that is, the speaker or reader gains something directly from the original that cannot be obtained from a translation. Prayers and hymns can be a great example. But, generally, those artifacts will either be preserved or lost on the basis of their relevance to the people within the culture, and little can be done to prod their protection from the outside. Many religions have gone extinct. ■ But if learning a language can be hard (especially if the speaker has no particular emotional compulsion to learn it), then something else may need to be done to preserve and disseminate some of the other cultural information that defines cultures whose populations may be in decline. ■ People generally learn best when they can recognize an element of self-interest to what they are learning. (You can't blame our genes for rewarding the learning processes that raise the odds of them jumping to the next generation.) So how do you make that cultural transmission process more friendly to individual self-interest? ■ The answer likely lies in recognizing that the real blueprint for a culture is found in how it reaches decisions: At the individual, family, and social levels. In essence, anthropologists and historians could do a great deal of good for extinct and endangered cultures by recording and publishing their decision-making processes. ■ While it may seem casual or even superficial, the world would likely see a lot more transmission about these cultures if thoughtful people would write books like "The ___ Approach to Leadership" or "The ___ Way of Making Choices" than by packing academic libraries with dry, unread journal articles and graduate theses. In return, perhaps some of the many "stateless nations" of the world might at least stand a chance of being remembered, even as much of the world converges on globally-shared cultures.
September 6, 2024
The contemporary ease of content creation has stripped away some of the obstacles that used to stand in the way of producing material for its own sake. On one hand, that frees some worthwhile voices to get exposure that would otherwise have never broken through in the more heavily-mediated past, when editors and publishers and producers decided what got made and disseminated. ■ On the other hand, it sets up incentives that reward people merely for being "influencers" -- no matter what malignant nonsense they project into the universe. And that's ultimately why the US Justice Department has "charged two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, in a $10 million scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging". ■ The plot made a handful of people very rich in exchange for their dignity. They effectively, whether wittingly or unwittingly, acted as tools of an adversarial foreign government. They may face criminal penalties, too. ■ But they made lots of money, and to people for whom civic duty is no object, then the remuneration is all that matters. The results, of course, tell any honest onlooker that something beyond remuneration must matter -- that civic responsibility really is a meaningful thing. ■ That modern tools have made it easier for people to profit by selling their souls is a fact we can't escape. Teaching the next generation that intangibles like duty still matter is the counterweight.
At some time in the future, probably not that long from now, people will look back on the present as a time of excruciatingly low information density. We are living through a conspicuous explosion of content creation -- YouTube alone claims that more than 500 hours of video content are being uploaded every minute. That's the equivalent of 3.4 years of new content per hour. And then there's TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and on and on. ■ Some of this content is astonishingly good. Much of it is middling. No small portion of it is garbage. The well-known historian Niall Ferguson examines the world of pop history delivered via podcasts and declares, "They are mostly drowning it [history] in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious." ■ There is another side to the coin, of course, which is asserted in the words of another historian, David H. Montgomery: "There are awful history podcasts -- and also great ones, with excellent research. (This statement also happens to be true of books.)" It is not the medium itself that determines the quality of the content: Someone keeps paying Bill O'Reilly to put his name on books. That doesn't make the printing press the problem. ■ But thanks to the ease of production and dissemination, so much content is being poured out at such low information density that the pendulum almost certainly must swing somewhat back in the other direction, if from nothing else than audience exhaustion. There are only so many swipes a person can give to a litany of mediocre Facebook Reels before they may begin to regret not simply picking up one of the 100 books everyone should read. ■ The immediacy of electronic media can be utterly seductive, but if that seduction isn't followed by a fulfilling experience, then people will ultimately grow weary. And wasn't weary boredom what the Internet promised to eradicate?
September 9, 2024
If Americans can be rightly accused of having a national personality characteristic, a thoughtful analyst might say that we have a predisposition in favor of action. "Shoot first and ask questions later", if you will. Alexis de Tocqueville said of it: "In Europe we are wont to look upon a restless disposition, an unbounded desire of riches, and an excessive love of independence, as propensities very formidable to society. Yet these are the very elements which ensure a long and peaceful duration to the republics of America." ■ Yet on the other hand, we are known to be painfully slow to act on large and dreadful threats. The apocryphal quote from Winston Churchill goes, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities." He probably didn't say it, exactly, but it has survived in lore because it contains at least a kernel of truth. ■ So are we hot-tempered or blissfully untroubled? Perhaps it's a hybrid of the two: We are prone to liking quick decisions, but we're also habituated to realize that those decisions often need to be revisited not too much later. ■ Thus we have the world's longest-serving written Constitution -- but one that was amended immediately out of the gate. We have an often hot-headed House of Representatives with zippy two-year terms, but also a Senate that acts like a tenured university faculty. We are prone to a lot of "Yeehaw!" but also a substantial amount of second-guessing. ■ Now is a time to make sure we are second-guessing wisely: On any number of fronts, looming issues that haven't gotten thorough consideration are starting to show themselves once again to the forefront. Many of them are deeply complex, from the reach of artificial intelligence to the ambitions of rival powers to the costs of a Federal budget that we seem obligated to keep expanding. ■ Impulsive figures of both left and right once put into power might need to be benched until we have a steadier view of a turbulent future. There's nothing wrong with reconsidering past judgments: That just might be the American Way.
September 10, 2024
ABC News will host a Presidential debate tonight under unprecedented circumstances; never before in the television era has a Presidential campaign begun with two presumptive party nominees debating one another, only for one of those presumptive nominees to be replaced before Election Day. It is in the self-interest of ABC News to make as much hype of the event as possible. ■ A serious Presidential debate would ask several questions. The seriousness of this debate will be reflected, in part, by how close any of the questions come to issues like these, which are (a) of significant national interest, (b) closely under the umbrella of the President's Article II duties under the Constitution, and (c) likely to have at least some meaningful effect on the next four years, especially if not dealt with assertively. ■ Question 1: "What tools of the Executive Branch would you use to encourage the development of new tools to combat the effects of antibiotic resistance?" Health care has been a major part of the national menu of issues for decades, but we have generally avoided addressing significant growing threats like antibiotic resistance. We saw the consequences of long-term underinvestment in pandemic preparedness in 2020, and the unfathomable costs of that underinvestment. The market incentives to develop new antibiotics are no longer working adequately, so what can or will the next President do about it before it's too late? ■ Question 2: "What do you propose as the appropriate size for a modern US Navy? If you propose one larger than we have now, how would your proposal deal with shortages of both shipbuilding capacity and willing sailors?" America's naval power remains enormous, but our shipbuilding has stalled at a time when China is taking an adversarial posture in the Pacific Ocean. As a matter of national defense, this issue matters enormously to the next Commander-in-Chief. ■ Question 3: "Ukraine has demonstrated novel uses for drones in wartime. Now that the cat is out of the bag, what priorities would you set for the Defense Department around both drone deployment and our own domestic defensive vulnerabilities?" Ukraine has just projected its response to the Russian invasion straight into Moscow with a drone attack. What is learned on the battlefield in this war will only spread globally. We need to know that the next President understands that Russia's unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine has just sped up the timetable for new strategies and tactics that will affect us in the next war. ■ Question 4: "Local water utilities have expressed grave concerns over the costs of removing the PFAS 'forever chemicals' from water, as Federal regulations appear to expect them to do. How would you address the tension between these competing regulatory interests?" It's already widely-known that the United States has badly under-invested in infrastructure for a long time. New regulatory postures are likely to require much more sophisticated and expensive treatment far beyond the existing standards, in which investment was already lax. These are competing interests largely imposed by the Federal government, so what will that government do about it? ■ If we don't hear anything like any of these questions during the Presidential Debate, then we should cease the practice of televised debates immediately and instead subject the candidates to timed essay exams. (They could even be televised, with hushed, golf-like commentary!) But if the practice of "debate" is nothing more than performance art, it's hard to see how any of it advances the public interest.
September 11, 2024
The annual recitation of the names of those killed in the September 11th attacks remains a solemn event; it is a litany lasting nearly four hours. It is small counterweight to the way history encroaches on living memory. The median American living today was about 15 years old at the time of the dreadful events of that day; it won't be long before more people know it only as an abstraction from textbooks rather than a remembered trauma. ■ Reading a name alone isn't all that much in the way of tribute. By comparison, even the sparse half-dozen or so words that can be added to a veteran's headstone seem like they convey volumes about the decedent's time on Earth. Yet it would be difficult to add even that much to a roll call of those who perished on 9/11 without making the annual memorials altogether too long. ■ Yet a great deal of merit is done by reciting those names, rather than merely recounting the dead as a single whole number: 2,977. It wasn't their tragedy all together; it was a sinister deed resulting in 2,977 unique and individual calamities. ■ The importance of remembering and saying the names of the dead is of shared significance across many cultures and religious traditions. It's an important act for the living because it serves as a reminder that no matter how many we are in number, whatever our circumstances may be, each person affects the world around them individually. What we do in large groups matters, too, but seldom if ever does it matter as much as to those who would recognize a name.
September 13, 2024
A recurring theme in national news coverage about education is the well-worn "contest" between the classic college education and the trades. Headlines like "Want job security? Trade school could help" almost invariably lead stories that pitch technical or blue-collar skills as rivals to the liberal arts and white-collar career training. ■ It is, as it always has been, a false dichotomy. The technical trades, crafts, and occupations don't have to be rivalrous with a liberal education; likewise, those who go on to earn bachelors' degrees and onward should probably include some kind of vocational skill development as part of a well-rounded education. The two fields should be harmonized and complementarized: Plumbers who read the classics? Accountants who know how to wire low-voltage panels? Why not both? Why not a pathway from alternative rocker to Ph.D. molecular biologist? ■ What America could really use is some innovation around a 2+2 model of post-secondary education: One that makes room for both trade skills and liberal arts, ensuring that most everyone who wants it can enter adulthood with marketable skills. Many paths would fit naturally together; a wiring trade might fork naturally into computer science or electrical engineering. Bookkeeping might wind its way later on to a CPA or an MBA. A digital marketing certificate may end up pointing towards application development or system administration later. ■ Most important is that we seek to lower the barriers to human-capital formation. People shouldn't find themselves irrevocably locked into choices they made at age 18. For some, college ends up as an expensive false start towards a bachelor's degree. For others, the long path to a degree in law or medicine ends up at an unfulfilling destination -- but between student loans and foregone opportunities, they may see no way out. ■ For everyone across the spectrum of possibilities, more stackable credentials (individual achievements that can accrue towards larger goals) and more pathways are probably the answers. ■ Especially as technological and economic progress ensure that almost every job becomes more complex with time, an increasing number of people would benefit from a liberation from inflexible educational and career paths that treat ages 18 and 22 as magical "on" and "off" ramps, never to be revisited. The more we see education and training as parallels with work rather than things we must do in series, the better.
September 14, 2024
Yesterday's city mouse; today's country mouse
Tales that trumpet the moral high ground of the "country mouse" over that of the vice-beholden "city mouse" are at least as old as one of Aesop's fables -- recorded more than 2,500 years ago. So, on one hand, it is no surprise that the spirit of the tale remains around even today, when some people turn to spinning tales about where to find "Real America". Invariably, they find it off the beaten path. ■ On the other hand, the longevity of the supposed contrast should be all the proof anyone needs to dismiss it as absurd. The biggest city Aesop could have possibly meant in his allegorical tale would have been Athens, which might have contained 200,000 people at most. Not a village, of course, but probably a little bit smaller than the metropolitan populations of Monroe, Louisiana, or Johnson City, Tennessee, today -- places that almost certainly fit the stereotype to be called rural, "real" America. ■ Some people are "country mice" by nature, preferring an unhurried pace and lots of space to themselves. Others are natural "city mice", favoring crowds and noise and speed. But it's all relative: The biggest Greek city of Aesop's day would be only the eighth-largest in Louisiana today. ■ We shouldn't confuse some preferences for others. There's nothing wrong with preferring a country-mouse pace, nor with a city-mouse pace, either. Neither confers any elevated moral stature -- nor any depravity, either. ■ It's not even valid to think that they reflect adjacent preferences about things like introversion or extroversion. There are plenty of extroverts who like the country life, and plenty of introverts who want to be close to the center of action (even if they don't want to talk to anyone when they get there). "City" versus "country" is often a proxy for other assumptions, and quite often we're not at all clear with one another about which of those assumptions we're making. ■ What really matters is whether people have the maximum freedom to choose what fits them personally, allowing them to optimize their own lifestyle choices in the limited time any one of us has on Earth. The freedom to move about -- even to literally take an entire home with you on the road -- is the thing that actually makes America great. All of its places are real.
September 16, 2024
A philosophical current that has gained some traction and influence in recent years has adopted the peculiar label of "postliberalism". Within this tent, there are some objectively intelligent and often persuasive thinkers who try to make the case that the "common good" must be made to prevail over individual freedom. ■ If we understand the word "liberalism" not in the odd sense that the American left/right scheme misuses it, but instead in the way it makes sense in a universal way, then we recognize it as a philosophy that values individual liberty as the most important value for a government to preserve, protect, and defend. ■ That isn't to say that individual freedoms are the most important of all values a society can uphold -- only that the purpose of forming a government, which can do lots of things to the individual (like imprisonment, conscription, or even execution), is to protect those liberties. ■ Other things have to go along with freedoms in order for a system to work, but those things have to be chosen. Humans know we're meant to be free. We have to be taught how to be responsible. The institutions that teach concepts like duty have to be flexible, because what's needed from dutiful people changes over time. ■ And thus, the problem with people who say they want more things like responsibility and duty, but who call themselves "postliberals": There is no post-liberalism. There is either liberalism or illberalism. ■ There is no logical consistency to thinking that there is something "after" personal liberties, free inquiry, and the intrinsic worth of the individual. There are complementary virtues (like duty and responsibility) that go along with liberty, but governments can only be good if they are constrained. Specifically, they must be constrained from harming personal liberties. That is the soul of humanity's liberal experiment. ■ Anyone who insists that they can solve complex (some would say impossible) problems like maximizing the "common good" by telling people how to live isn't choosing something "after" liberalism; they're choosing something before or other than liberty.
September 17, 2024
From time to time, an American might be asked to observe a dress code at a public event, or a student may be asked to reverse a t-shirt with a provocative slogan. It's fairly uncommon; we tend to be free-speech zealots in this country, and the occasional invocation of restrictions on time, manner, or place tend to stand out as the exceptions that prove the rule. By and large, words are welcome to do combat so that fists do not. ■ Such is not the case everywhere. In Hong Kong, a 27-year-old man has just pleaded guilty to a charge of sedition merely for wearing a t-shirt in public. The words "Liberate Hong Kong" were just too much for the Chinese Communist Party (and its local quasi-apparatchiks) to bear. Hong Kong, of course, has been in a free-speech freefall since the imposition of a draconian law restricting speech in 2020. ■ Americans would be merely interested onlookers -- hopefully, sympathetic to the cause of freedom -- if it weren't for the growing projection of the Chinese regime's anti-speech attitude far beyond the country's own borders. They've threatened American movie studios, created human blockades in Australia, and opened secret-police bureaus in free countries to monitor and intimidate dissidents (or perhaps worse). ■ These offenses make Chinese laws on speech into significant global issues, rather than mere domestic ones. The dismantling of the "second" system which Hong Kong had been promised is a reminder to the world that if there's one thing an authoritarian regime cannot stand, it is the liberty of individual thought. Today, it's a personal crisis for one dissident. But in a world where pressure against activists and political figures can take on an instant global footprint, there's no need to wait until tomorrow to take it seriously.
September 18, 2024
Elon Musk has taken to his place on the platform formerly known as Twitter to amplify a false rumor about a bomb threat at a political rally. As one of the wealthiest and most widely-known people on the planet, he has considerably more ability to amplify a claim than, for example, the police department saying the bomb story is false. ■ Musk probably doesn't consider himself an "elder", but at the age of 53, he is 14 years older than the median American and thus certainly qualifies, at least in the chronological sense. In some cultural contexts, age may play a part in defining an elder; in others, a person might be an "elder" as young as age 18. Thomas Jefferson was merely 33 years old when he acted as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. ■ Many cultural institutions observe an implied covenant between "elders" and the rest of the community: We, the community, listen gracefully, while you, the elders, seek to provide real wisdom born of reflection, consideration, and judgment. Those elders who choose to break the covenant don't deserve continued respect. ■ Lots of people who ought to know better misuse their influence for selfish ends. It is telling just how disconnected so many people who are (at least) chronological elders seem to be from the wisdom of their own ancestors and elders. This choice to divorce themselves from the custody of some kind of continuum seems to make them less likely to recognize their own responsibility to act as a link in a chain, transmitting "elder" wisdom on to their juniors and improving upon it with each retelling and each new generation. ■ The instinct to seek guidance from elders remains as strong as it has ever been, but if people held in high esteem -- whether on a global scale or merely at the family level -- cleave off their sense of duty to first learn and discern before spouting off whatever has most recently tickled their fancy, then we are headed for trouble. Eldership is a mutual responsibility.
September 19, 2024
In the course of critiquing the behavior of certain newsmakers, economist Daron Acemoglu offers an interesting two-fold analysis of behavior at the extremes, noting: "[S]tatus is largely zero-sum. More status for somebody means less for another. A steeper status hierarchy makes some people happy, and others unhappy and dissatisfied. Investment in zero-sum activities is often inefficient and excessive, as compared to investment in non-zero-sum activities." ■ It's an observation worth applying to the world where ordinary people live, too. At the extremes, some people try to gain status over others by buying expensive things and showing them off. This is the classic folly of "conspicuous consumption". ■ But who hasn't heard the argument that it's better to buy experiences rather than goods? And is there anyone for whom is it not generally true? ■ Acemoglu's follow-up to that material/immaterial divide is important, too: "Compare, for example, the social value of spending money on pure gold multi-million-dollar Rolex watches versus spending time to learn some new skills [...] The second type of investment, on the other hand, increases your human capital [and] also contributes to society." ■ Goods, though, are easier to mass-produce than experiences -- especially ones that "increase human capital" (by developing new skills). Perhaps one of those people with lots of resources could chase some of that zero-sum status by investing in the creation of the kinds of tools and institutions that make it easier for others to access new human capital. Carnegie's libraries did something just like that a century ago. The innovation ought to continue.
September 20, 2024
Poland and Czechia are experiencing catastrophic flooding -- enough to cause disruptions in Czech elections and leave billions of dollars in damages behind. It's an event so widespread and significant that it's engaged an EU-wide response. ■ Neighbors being neighborly, Germany has offered the assistance of some of its military units. Poland's president, Donald Tusk, announced the help with some deadpan commentary: "If you see German soldiers, please do not panic. They are here to help." ■ It's a funny line that speaks to a much more serious issue: We should never assume that the conditions that prevail today are going to continue in a straight line projection into the future. Germany, projected on a straight line out of 1939, would have been irredeemable. It needed to be stopped by a stronger power with greater moral bearings, and it was. ■ The evil within Germany had to be defeated -- crushed, even. The worst perpetrators deserved punishment as exactly the war criminals they chose to be. ■ But Germany as a concept? As a nation of people, representing a culture? As a historical continuity? It went wrong and it needed correction, including an occupation and reconstruction. ■ The world demanded that Germany become better, that it redeem itself and stay redeemed. Now, a human lifespan removed from Germany's deepest evils, the world remembers -- Donald Tusk's teasing proves that. ■ Yet the world also expected Germany to live up to a better standard, and after lots of work, we are all better off for it. It's a lesson worth applying to the conditions in any number of places around the world that look unsalvageable to us today. Straight line projections don't apply.
September 23, 2024
The promise of a new app called "SocialAI" is that users will be able to turn to an environment that feels like a social network, permitting them to plumb the responses of "millions of AI followers" to their comments. The app developer says, "SocialAI does not have real users. All 'followers' are simulated fictional characters. All generated user posts are private and not shared anywhere." ■ The most charitable perspective on the service is that it will provide users with the ability to express feelings and thoughts to a "crowd" without suffering the consequences of putting an ill-considered Facebook post or Tweet out into the world for actual human consumption. ■ In that sense, it is perhaps best viewed as a harm-mitigation tool, rather like getting a cigarette smoker to switch to vaping instead. Not perfect, but probably less harmful than the original behavior. For some people known to have poor impulse control, that might be the trick -- especially if they are naturally inclined to process their thoughts externally. ■ An uncharitable perspective on the concept of the app would warn that it appears dangerously constituted to keep people from engaging with their own internal dialogue. Part of the danger of having literally unlimited sources of content at our disposal at all times is that people can become addicted to consuming inputs without reserving adequate time for processing. ■ The app claims it is a feature to "Feel the boost of always being surrounded by your AI community". One doesn't have to be Henry David Thoreau to recognize that sometimes what we need least is more external input. ■ Computerized tools can offer lots of useful ways to supplement the work of human beings, and from time to time, feedback that feels like it's coming from a human (when it is expressly not) might be a useful adjunct to some. But self-restraint is rarely the characteristic app developers seek to encourage, so prospective users ought to beware.
September 24, 2024
A former BBC editor, reminiscing about working on the organization's "Ceefax" teletext service, says this of the transition to delivering news content on the Internet in a hybrid model with teletext: "Because we now had to service audiences for both Ceefax and the website, the top four paragraphs of a web story still had to be totally self-contained. In other words, all the relevant facts -- with balance -- had to be in there, just as they always had been. Writers then had to write a fifth paragraph of context before expanding the story on the website." ■ As trivial as that may sound, it speaks to the way that constraints cause us to create memorable things. When an artist selects a medium or a style -- pointillism, or a capella singing, or black-and-white photography, or haiku -- the constraint enforces discipline, which in turn often instigates deeper creativity than saying "anything goes". ■ That's one of the characteristics so often lost when people turn to digital media today: There's no inherent limit to the length of your podcast series, your Substack newsletter, or your YouTube channel. Unbound by artificial constraints, people feel like they have to go on and on. The constraints are what generate real artistic flair. ■ Without those constraints, people tend to optimize around low-input, high-output formulas, like the tiresome "I'm a ___, here's why ___" structure of news headlines seen everywhere. Those headlines used to be constrained by physical space on the printed page and thus had to convey lots of information in the equivalent of a few bytes; now, they're written as long as needed in order to tick the boxes that boost their search-engine performance. ■ It can be hard to appreciate the power of limitations in a time when most of the talk is about the blue-sky potential of technologies like artificial intelligence, but human intelligence is geared towards problem-solving. We're often at our best not when faced with a blank canvas, but rather with a puzzle to figure out. Constraints (like the character count enforced by a tool like teletext) lead to more colorful work.
September 25, 2024
Warren Buffett is credited with saying, "Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." With Helene bearing down on America's Gulf Coast today, we ought to acknowledge a different flavor of Buffett's sentiment: Somebody evacuated safely from the path of a dangerous hurricane today because someone started collecting data and building a model a long time ago. ■ We should be astonished by the quality of the forecast models developed by teams at the National Weather Service and other meteorological organizations around the world, like Europe's ECMWF. They're able to foresee the genesis of a potentially catastrophic hurricane days in advance, when it looks like nothing but a small batch of clouds in the western Caribbean. ■ Meteorologists should be proud of themselves for having made such developments, and society should be thankful to our predecessors and our past selves for investing in a system of scientific development that has made so much progress. The advancements that sometimes look only incremental have compounding effects, and they don't happen by accident -- they happen through intentional efforts to get better in the name of saving lives and protecting property. ■ Other sciences ought to look to the example of meteorology for an example of how to drive a science toward ever-increasing maturity. The public should look to the field as an examplar for generating a responsible return on public investment. ■ We don't have the technology (at least not yet) to keep adverse weather from happening, and there's little reason to believe we ever will. But improving the quality of the science involved and communicating it well to mass audiences are two things our experts have shown their dedication to doing well.
September 26, 2024
An article published at Inside Higher Ed suggests that college undergraduate students aren't reading much of what is being assigned to them by their professors, and adopts a tone suggesting that summaries generated by artificial intelligence and video-based subject primers are displacing the act of reading. It is entirely possible that "kids these days" are too often choosing shortcuts around the learning process, to give off the superficial appearance of having engaged with the material rather than doing the actual engagement. ■ It would be hazardous, though, to assume that every undesirable-looking change is attributable to laziness. For one thing, academic writing is often notoriously bad. That's nothing new: Theodore Roosevelt lamented in 1912, "Many learned people seem to feel that the quality of readableness in a book is one which warrants suspicion. Indeed, not a few learned people seem to feel that the fact that a book is interesting is proof that it is shallow." ■ Moreover, academic writing is often wordy for its own sake. Ben Sasse, who has twice served as a college president, has noted, "I think lots of 300-page books could (and should) have been 30-page articles, but neither magazines nor book publishers have much of a market for 30 pages." It hearkens to an old joke that goes, "My book was 400 pages long because I didn't have time to write it in 200 pages." It takes real dedication to say things both briefly and well. ■ And there is one other matter that can't be overlooked: By the time students are in college, the burden has begun to shift. Whereas the high-school student is required to attend (less they be counted truant), a college student is generally free to attend a lecture or not, and to read the material or not. Consequences might follow, but that depends on the instructor's expectations and assessment structure -- far more than is the case in a high school, where standardized testing often prevails. ■ An adept instructor of college-aged learners (or adults beyond) ought to put real thought into what is being taught, why it matters, and how it can best be assessed. If the knowledge being imparted by lectures and textbooks can be delivered well enough by a YouTube video that the students can pass the test, then either the video is good enough (at least for some learners) or the test isn't very good at all. The burden of assessing these things falls on the instructor, not the students. ■ In many subject areas, reading remains (on average) the fastest, most reliable mode of transmitting information. But that isn't always the case, and it also may vary from one student to the next. Sometimes the writing just isn't very good! ■ That's where pedagogy comes into play: A subject-matter expert isn't always the best teacher -- nor is a great teacher necessarily always a subject-matter expert. Recognizing that instructional design matters -- and that it is just as valid a field of expertise as any other -- is probably more important now than ever before. Those who fail to adapt do so (or, rather, don't) at their own peril.
September 27, 2024
While under investigation for bribery and other criminal charges, New York City mayor Eric Adams claimed to the FBI that he forgot the passcode to his phone and thus couldn't unlock the phone to permit investigators to dig in. It is a claim that is at once both plausible and unbelievable. ■ It is plausible because passwords are a mess. What might have been good for security purposes in 1990 is wholly inadequate today. Every phone, for instance, should have a lock screen -- but anyone with children in the home knows that even a toddler can learn to "shoulder surf" and break those codes with only the slightest amount of attention. ■ Real passwords, meanwhile, like the ones we use on everything from high-risk activity like online banking to low-risk activity like ordering take-out, are an utter goulash of inconsistent rules and requirements. Consequently, most people either duplicate their passwords in highly predictable fashion across all kinds of services, or they get into the habit of writing or saving the passwords in places that are easily cracked. One site may require a minimum of 12 characters, while another may impose a 12-character maximum. "Special characters" are often required -- but sometimes, only a select few are allowed. And then there are the services that require password updates every 3 or 6 months, only contributing to the confusion. ■ None of these are believable excuses in Adams's case, of course. He has overwhelming reason to try to hide his tracks, and offering a phone that can't be unlocked seems consistent with such a pattern of behavior. If there's one password or code someone had be dead certain to remember, it's the one to get into a personal phone. ■ Phones are the holy grail of two-factor authentication: If you are smart enough to require more than just a password to login to any site or service, then you almost certainly need your phone to receive the second "factor" -- usually a challenge code sent either to an authenticator app or a one-time code that arrives via text or email. ■ If the mayor of America's largest city is too dumb to manage his personal phone security well enough to remember a 6-digit screen lock code, then everyone on his personal staff, executive protection unit, and cybersecurity team (especially) ought to be fired for gross dereliction of duty. Your phone can tell people where you are, it can spy on your conversations, and it is the virtually unobstructed expressway straight to your brain. Any VIP needs to have ten times the phone savvy of an ordinary person, and it's up to staffers to be sure they have it. ■ At the very least, though, Adams's folly ought to be a good news hook to get everyone talking: Everyone needs good passwords, everyone needs good screen lock codes, and nobody should trust either of those things exclusively.
September 30, 2024
Self-organization and reinsurance pools
Americans are a notoriously self-organizing people. We can point to a heritage celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 or reported with pride by Benjamin Franklin in 1790 for evidence of its long lineage. ■ But there are times when voluntarism can only do so much, and the catastrophic damage left behind after Hurricane Helene -- especially in western North Carolina -- gives an unfortunate example of the limits. North Carolina's state Department of Transportation has said, "Unless it's an emergency, all roads in Western NC should be considered closed". Local media depict complete devastation of the local transportation infrastructure. ■ Individual states within the United States already have a considerable supply of what we call "state capacity": The ability to get things done. Most states are comparable in population to independent countries around the world, and almost all have state-level gross domestic products that punch even further above their weight for population. ■ It ought to be well within our capacity at the national level to have a sort of backup level of service that can be rushed to the scene of similar disasters -- in much the same way that insurance companies have reinsurance companies to help backstop their own risk. More than anything, the national level of government should be able to supply a rapid-reaction effort to fill in for ordinary transportation and logistics networks until those networks can be brought back into operation. ■ We lean heavily on the National Guard to do that work, but considering the volatility of the geopolitical situation, it might be time for us as a nation to decide that the risk burden is large enough and widespread enough to justify a commonwealth investment in building the capacity to make the fastest repairs possible to stand in when everything else falls apart.
It isn't uncommon for someone to look at a weed growing in an inhospitable location like a parking-lot crack and have a fleeting thought of respect for the cleverness of the weed. Of course, it's a mistake to anthropomorphize a weed. The weed is no smarter than evolution has selected into its genes. ■ Yet we should recognize that nature does have a characteristic that we would recognize as intelligence, even if it isn't truly sentient. Sometimes intelligence shows up simply in adaptation to circumstances and the development of responses to those circumstances. A conditioning effect, as it were. ■ There are plenty of human beings who demonstrate the same kind of quasi-intelligence, and we often struggle to depict it correctly. Sometimes it's called "cunning" or "guile". Other times, it's even begrudgingly described as an "animal intelligence". ■ These people adapt their behaviors around circumstances or respond to stimuli in a way that almost looks like intelligent thought -- but most people of goodwill struggle to call it that, because it isn't a sense of deliberate, enlightened self-improvement. That's what we usually like to describe as "intelligence": It can start as a gift, but it takes form when the holder decides to make something better of themselves with it. ■ Enlightened self-improvement comes from a choice. There lots of people who show that kind of enlightened self-improvement, even when they are not innately "smart". That's what makes it laudable: Enlightened self-improvement can be undertaken by almost anyone. What we shouldn't do is applaud people who simply adapt, weed-like, around circumstances for selfish gain. ■ Words matter. Often, the lack of good words to describe things matters quite a lot, too. That we don't have an evident turn of phrase for this "weed intelligence" is a misfortune for us all, especially because those who exhibit it are often the ones of whom we ought to be most wary.